The white paper sign on the wire cage door to a workshop at the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant sums it all up quite nicely. "Home of the celebrated Window Team. We ONLY do windows."

For the past 14 years, teams of volunteers, many retirees from Ford Motor, a few from General Motors, many who never even worked in the auto industry, have been painstakingly restoring 355 double sash windows at an old Detroit factory that's called the "Birthplace of the Model T."

Henry Ford had an office at the small, three-story brick factory, built in 1904, and reminiscent of an old textile mill. Its historic relevance is intensified by a special "secret room" that had been walled off in a corner of the third floor. There, Henry Ford and others nurtured the idea for a car that was affordable enough to end up being sold to the masses and the Model T was born. The Model T was developed here and introduced in 1908 as a 1909 model.

The first 12,000 Model T cars were built at the Piquette plant that sits on an industrial corner of Detroit's Milwaukee Junction neighborhood, north of the Detroit Institute of Arts and not far from the Amsterdam Street station for the QLINE streetcar system on Woodward Avenue.

The role of the retiree brigade and the restoration of all those 355 windows are a part of its story. These quiet heroes have diligently showed up for years, created their own workshop, donated tools and worked hard to bring light back to an important part of Detroit's history.

Without fixing all those windows, the plant might just be another vacant building. But now it's a trendy spot that's used for weddings and other events. The Piquette plant — which is open to the public from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday — is on national and state registers of historic places.

"We're down to only 16 windows," said Art Pope, 83, who was one of the original team of volunteers back in 2003. The job could be done by late fall.

Auburn Hills-based Guardian Industries has donated many of the glass panes to restore the windows. Edsel B. Ford II — the great-grandson of Henry Ford — and his wife Cynthia Ford donated money to adopt windows on the front of the building.

By one estimate, the work of the volunteers could add up to almost $1 million.

Pope supplies the 10 a.m. coffee and Donut Cutter donuts to the crew of 18 to 20 volunteers who show up on Mondays from April to late November. There's an annual breakfast in early December at Leon's Family Dining restaurant in Dearborn to honor the most valuable players of the season with baseball caps.

Even though the window work might be nearly done, volunteers expect to keep working to maintain the restored windows or work on other projects at the plant, which is one of the oldest factories in the country that's open to the public. The window team has built doors and interior fixtures, too.

The plant is operated by a nonprofit organization incorporated as the Model T Automotive Heritage Complex, which bought the building at Piquette and Beaubien in 2000. See www.FordPiquettePlant.org.

"It's not a pristine museum; it's a real place. It actually manufactured 45,000 cars. People toiled here," said Nancy Darga, executive director for the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant. In all, eight Ford models were built there.

Darga sees many heroes in the story starting from the early dedicated preservationists who took money out of their own pockets to help buy the building to generous donations to the "Adopt a Window" program to the volunteers.

"The window team is a hero because they provided the muscle. They provided the muscle to save the building," she said. She estimates that all that work added up to under $1 million.

The large, expansive windows provided maximum daylight to workers when cars were in production. But decades later, many of the windows were broken, and the building was full of pigeons and raccoons, according to Darga, who wasn't even sure early on that dreams of restoring the building would work. Darga first became involved with restoration efforts at the Piquette plant in 2000 when she was the chief of design for Wayne County Parks.

The Model T did well enough after early production at Piquette that Ford soon bought 57 acres to build the massive Highland Park Plant and begin assembly there in 1910. The property at 461 Piquette Ave. was sold to Studebaker in 1911 and Studebaker used the building for auto production until 1933. Other owners followed.

Frame shows a 'before' and 'after' example of some of the restoration efforts.(Photo: Susan Tompor)

But by the late 1990s, the Piquette building was long neglected and in rough shape, much like the neighborhood around it, when Jerald Mitchell, a retired professor of anatomy at Wayne State University School of Medicine, and others worked to save the building from potentially being demolished.

Pope, who grew up in Tennessee, developed a love for Ford that goes back to a 1930 Model A Ford — which was built before he was born but bought by him for around $275 with money he earned while working at an ice cream store in high school.

"It was just a little two-door," Pope said.

When he graduated from Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville in 1956, he had a couple of offers but chose to work as an engineer at Ford. In January 1957, he went into the U.S. Army for two years.

He proudly tells you that he was part of a disc brake team at Ford in the 1960s. He lived in Dearborn the entire time he worked at Ford. He retired in 1995 and now lives in Bloomfield Township.

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Bill Stewart of Livonia, left, and Art Pope of Bloomfield Township, former Ford employees, are reflected in glass that was donated for the restoration work at the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant on Monday, July 17, 2017.(Photo: Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press)

Pope connected with the Piquette plant in 2003 when a group of Ford dealers in metro Detroit wanted to make a sizable donation to help restore a small group of arch windows on the third floor. It started with a plan involving three volunteers, including Pope. But then, the project grew as the volunteers looked at cardboard-covered windows, broken glass and other states of disrepair in the building

The restoration process is quite involved including removing glass and hardware and stripping frames to bare wood. The windows are being restored to U.S. Department of Interior historic preservation standards.

Deteriorated wood needs to be hardened with a two-part epoxy formula. Missing areas of the wood are reconstructed. And volunteers take part in sanding, priming and re-glazing of original glass when possible.

"You can see here, the ones that are not clear are recycled glass," Pope said, as he walked with me around the Piquette plant last week.

Pope and others said they found a reason to keep working all those years on the windows because of the historical value.

"You can see a building that Henry Ford himself had worked in," Pope said.

"Obviously, this is a historical shrine," said Eugene Greenstein, who retired from Ford in 2005 as a mid-level engineering manager.

Greenstein, who lives in Farmington Hills, has been volunteering for about eight years. He grew up in Cleveland where he learned how to cut glass at his father's hardware store.

Louise VanderKolk, who lives in Canton and was a stay-at-home mom after working for the Michigan Credit Union League, said she had no idea how involved restoring windows would be when a neighbor sent her an e-mail about volunteering.

VanderKolk, 77, ended up working on the project for the past seven years and is one of the few female volunteers. Some wives of team members also have pitched in periodically.

VanderKolk puts primer on the sanded frames and one coat of dark green paint, then the glass is put back into place and she puts on another coat of green paint. It takes roughly 40 hours to do one window completely — including about two hours of painting time.

"I like the idea that they're saving a building," she said.

Mike Maher, 72, a retired pharmacist who lives in Huntington Woods, is a volunteer who owns a 1916 Model T. He bought the Model T about 10 years ago and paid about $10,000.

"It's my chick magnet," Maher deadpans. "My brother said the problem is all the chicks are over 90 years old."

Many volunteers see the work at the Ford Piquette plant as a way to give back to the community and foster a legacy.

"You can't just sit at home and look at a computer screen," Greenstein said.

Darga said she's working on putting a proposal together to see whether a documentary could be done on the volunteers.

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It is coffee break for a group of volunteers that are working on a major restoration project focusing on doors and windows at the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit on Monday, July 17, 2017. The group that call themselves the "window team" and gather April through October at the historic plant known as the birthplace of the Model T. (Photo: Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press)

"The volunteerism is what really saved this place," Darga said. "This building was totally saved and run by volunteers up until 2013. They've done all the work at it, stabilizing it."

"This story is so inspirational that it needs to be shared nationwide."

Many of the window team, she said, travel each week more than an hour to work in the plant. They've grown to care about one another over the years as well.

"You'd think they were all related, the way they rib and tease each other," she said. "They come here because of the story and they want to preserve it."

We take a lot for granted in the Motor City when it comes to mobility for the masses. We're often onto the next new thing, now the story is the self-driving vehicles.

Even so, the Piquette plant's narrow wood stairways, the worn floors and all those 355 double sash windows spark one's imagination and appreciation for an incredible story.

"You've got to think about it, the whole world changed from what happened in this building," Darga said.